jdou86
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- Homework Statement
- GRE
- Relevant Equations
- GRE PHysics
Statistics of radioactive decay
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Same as in the other thread, you'll have to show what you did so far.
I extended the title to be more descriptive of the problem statement.
If you have a measurement, e.g. 100 counts in 7 seconds, what will your uncertainty on the rate be?
I extended the title to be more descriptive of the problem statement.
If you have a measurement, e.g. 100 counts in 7 seconds, what will your uncertainty on the rate be?
jdou86
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10 since since sigma is sqrt of N so I set sqrtN/N=0.1 but that didn't get me very far
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jdou86 said:
These problems take longer than a second to solve. Why don't you write down your strategy for solving this. In words.
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Well, that is an important step already. An uncertainty of 10 is an uncertainty of 10% here. Too much, you'll need more counts to get to 1%...jdou86 said:
jdou86
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I'm good thanksVanadium 50 said:
jdou86
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Sorry it's supposed to be 0.01 but it still won't make sense because 10,000 counts represents 1000s measurement.mfb said:
jdou86
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10000 counts is correct. You can use the existing measurements to get a rough estimate of the decay rate and use that to get the time you need to accumulate 10000 counts.